Employee engagement startup Hyphen acquired by Betterworks
Enterprise software for continuous performance management, Betterworks has acquired Hyphen, a leading continuous employee listening and engagement platform based in San Francisco. The terms of the acquisition are not disclosed.
Betterworks will integrate Hyphen’s survey, polling and recommendation capabilities into its enterprise offering as Betterworks Engage and customers adopting it will have the ability to continuously listen to employees from pre-hire to retire, turn these insights into goals and then seamlessly track improvement over time.
Hyphen, co-founded by Ranjit Jose and Arnaud Grunwald also was one of the participants of the People Matters TechHR Startup Program in 2017. With this acquisition, Hyphen’s team will be integrated into the Betterworks family and co-founder Arnaud Grunwald will be transitioning into the role of Chief Product Officer, Engagement at Betterworks.
In a blogpost, Arnuald stated, “Listening to employees is a critical capability to being a successful company and it’s important to create benchmarks, identify and prioritize initiatives that improve results and then track the progress of these key employee engagement metrics over time. With Betterworks and Hyphen coming together, it completes the loop of measuring engagement, then executing on the right areas using objectives and key results (OKRs), and then developing people with continuous conversations, feedback and recognition (CFRs).”
A convergence of factors has led to an increased focus on listening to employees at all stages in their lifecycle and taking action on that feedback: a younger workforce that values more personalized engagement, an understanding that employee performance is the driver of business performance and the need of both HR and leaders to have actionable insights about their workforce at their fingertips. With this acquisition, Betterworks aims to transform historically separate business and HR processes into an integrated, data-driven continuous approach to both business and talent management.
As per Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and a Betterworks Board Observer, "Feedback is one of the most important parts of performance management, so companies want and need these systems to work together. This acquisition is a good example of a big trend in the market: linking goal setting, conversations, surveys, and employee experience data into a single "action platform" for managers."
The acquisition is a validation of the growing importance of employee feedback for businesses. The best-run companies understand that they get a clear competitive advantage from building a culture of frequent, transparent feedback, and surfacing opportunities for people leaders to better retain their top performers and drive continuous data-driven business improvement. With this acquisition, Betterworks will further consolidate its efforts to engage allows businesses to tie the measurement of employee engagement more tightly to the delivery of desired business outcomes.
